Sunday, November 6, 2011

What is the most powerful single computer you can get today, measured in sheer numbers of double precision floating point operations per second (flops)? Possibly, the answer is a rack server (such as the HP half-width 4U in the picture below) with no less than eight(!) Nvidia Tesla M2090 cards installed. Each card offers a theoretical max of 665 Gflops of double precision computing power -- a total of 5.3 Tflops (not counting any CPUs). Now, go to the Top500 and find the list from 10 years ago ... November 2001. Just one of these servers would bring you a safe 3rd place on the list - very impressive for just ONE single machine.

Foto

One might argue, that a 4U rack unit is not a very practical computer - so what's the max you can cram into a a standard sized ATX chassis these days? Well, take four of these GPUs (and a good power supply), and you're up to about 2.7 Tflops, theoretical peak. 10 years ago that would bring well into top10 world wide with a box that you could put under your desk!

The Japanese "K Computer" is currently the fastest cluster out there and recently broke the 10 Pflops barrier (10¹⁶ flops)! Now, he question is, when can I expect to have that kind of performance in a desktop PC, and how about my huge ms protein molecular dynamics simulation?